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Louis Pasteur, famed microbiologist and inventor of pasteurization, once remarked in a university lecture, “chance favors the prepared mind.” But how much preparation is enough? If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s work, your mind has likely already jumped to 10,000 hours of preparation. Gladwell’s third book Outliers popularized the work of K. Anderson Ericsson and the notion that the key to success in any field was logging 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice.

If we want to true understand the heart of the debate, and find out if we’re wasting those 10,000 hours of preperation, then we have to go back to the original argument, and the research of K. Anders Ericsson. In his 1993 article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson and his co-authors present the idea of a required amount of preparation time and validate the 10-year, 10,000-hours, rule. But more of their work focuses on how world-class individuals are spending their 10,000 hours. Specifically, it isn’t just about 10,000 hours of doing the activity; it’s 10,000 hours of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” According to the paper, “deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.” Deliberate practice consists of specific training activities, drills, and exercises designed to stretch the individual’s skills and thereby provide growth. It is not just business as usual. Think back to when you were first learning a set of skills, anything from learning to play guitar to developing management skills. Odds are that you started out with more simple exercises, playing chords or thinking through case studies and experiential leadership training. Then you could get to work playing real songs or managing real projects.

More specifically, Ericsson and his colleagues point out what deliberate practice is not. Deliberate practice is not work and it is not play. Those activities are important, but they don’t count toward your 10,000 hours.

Work is where we exercise the skills we already have. At work, it is assumed that you’re bringing your best possible performance to satisfy the needs of a client or the organization. While some organizations pay for you to attend training, they recognize that time spent in training is the same thing as time spent “at work.” Likewise, few clients would pay for you to experiment and improve your techniques or skills on their dime. Moreover, because work involves using skills and talents you’ve already developed; the performance improvement from time spent at work is minimal compared to time spent in deliberate practice. That fact that you’ve managed a team for 10 years doesn’t automatically make you a world-class manager. Work isn’t deliberate practice.

Play is when we partake an in activity for the sake of enjoying the activity itself. The goal of play is to play. The goal of deliberate practice is improvement. Play is fun because it relies on the skills we already have to meet challenges we know we can face. When that happens we “lose ourselves” in the moment and we’re “in the zone.” When we’re in deliberate practice, activities that require total focus and are designed to stretch, we’re rarely enjoying ourselves. If you’re engaged in the activity for the fun of it, you’re probably not getting much better.

So are you wasting your 10,000 hours? Depends. While the exact number of hours required for expert performance might still be up for debate, what has never been debated is the role of deliberate practice. Are you spending your time engaged in routines you already know, or experimenting with new techniques and studying to develop new skills? Are you playing inside of your comfort zone, or designing exercises or projects to push you toward growth? If you’re not engaged in deliberate practice, then you are most certainly wasting your 10,000 hours.